Max Perutz

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Max Ferdinand Perutz, OM (May 19 1914 – February 6 2002) was an Austrian-British molecular biologist.

He was born in Vienna in 1914. In 1936 he became a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory in a crystallography group directed by J. Bernal, and remained in Cambridge subsequently.

During World War II, he was asked to find a way to improve the structural qualities of ice for Project Habakkuk (a secret project to build an aircraft carrier made of ice) and investigated the recently invented mixture of ice and woodpulp known as pykrete.

In 1953 Perutz showed that the diffracted X-rays from protein crystals could be phased by comparing the patterns from crystals of the protein with and without heavy atoms attached. In 1959 he determined the molecular structure of the protein hemoglobin, which transports oxygen in the blood, using this method. In 1962 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, with John Kendrew.

In the history of science, Perutz is also known as the nominal mentor of James D. Watson during the early 1950's, during which time Watson and Francis Crick determined the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Perutz established the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England in 1962 and was chairman until 1979. He remained active in research to the end of his life. From the mid-1980s on he was a regular reviewer/essayist for The New York Review of Books on biomedical subjects.

Max's flair for writing was a late development. Leo Perutz, the distinguished writer and a relative, once told Max when he was a boy that he would never be a writer, and so one of his most cherished awards was one for scientific writing. "I wish I had made you angry earlier" (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 1998) contains a selection of his essays on science, scientists and humanity. [1]

Max and his wife Gisela's son, Robin Perutz, is a professor of chemistry at the University of York in England.

[edit] Books

Is Science Necessary: Essays on Science and Scientists
I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Science, Scientists, and Humanity
Proteins and nucleic acids: structure and function.
Science is Not a Quiet Life: Unravelling the Atomic Mechanism of Haemoglobin
Glutamine Repeats and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Molecular Aspects
Protein Structure: A User's Guide
Le molecole dei viventi. Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 1998.